Phoenix on the Sound
by ForestLark
Summary: What if Nathan Ingram had saved one of the numbers? Complete.
1. Prologue

**Title:** Phoenix on the Sound

**Author:** ForestLark

**E-mail:**

**Rating:** M

**Spoilers:** Through Ep. 17, "Baby Blue;" set sometime shortly after that ep but before Ep. 18.

**Disclaimer: **Person of Interest is owned by CBS, and its characters are not mine. I'm just borrowing them, and not making any profit by it.

**Prologue**

As she did almost every night, Lisa Williams poured herself a glass of wine and carried it out to her deck to watch the sun set over Long Island Sound. It was a lonely way to spend her evenings, but Lisa's life was a lonely one, and it had been for some years. It was a life that moved at a slow pace, one where sunsets could be appreciated on a nightly basis. One where one of the few people she was on a first-name basis with was the elderly owner of the local used bookstore. One where it was no trouble to walk to the farmer's market to buy the ingredients to cook elaborate meals for one.

A chilly gust of fall air hit her when she opened the door, and she considered going back inside for a blanket, but decided against it. She could smell the rain coming, and knew she'd have to go back in soon enough. Stepping up to the railing, she watched the wind buffet the waves on the Sound, and thought about an evening like this one, when she'd first moved here and thought about ending it all. She'd struggled, at first, to downgrade everything she'd expected of life, to accept that this was all there was, all there might ever be, for the rest of her life.

It was a thought, nothing more, nothing she'd ever acted on. As soon as she thought of Nathan and everything he'd done for her, she knew she couldn't. He would have been so disappointed. She'd moved here because she wanted to stay close to him, although she knew she could never attempt to contact him unless she was in danger again. There was something of a comfort in looking toward the city and knowing he was there, the man who'd saved her life.

She'd had no idea the man was in her house. It was a Wednesday evening and she'd picked up a Dover Sole at the market. Dropped the paper-wrapped fish and her purse on the kitchen counter, and felt a gloved hand close around her throat. She'd struggled, tried to throw her elbow into the man's gut, to reach one of the knives in the block on the kitchen counter, but she could feel herself growing increasingly dizzy.

It was at that point that she realized why the man was there, why she was about to die. Three days ago, she'd walked into her boss' office at Fuller Avionics and threatened to go to the government over tests the company had falsified, hiding the failure rates of its newest engine. That engine was meant to go into specialized variations of the Black Hawk helicopter, and she'd be damned if she would put anyone in a combat zone at additional risk. She told herself anyone, but when she thought of the engines failing, she always thought of _him_ in a falling helicopter, its engine in flames as it spiraled down behind enemy lines.

"Do you think the government doesn't know already? Do you think I haven't been lining the right pockets to make sure we fulfill our contract?" her boss had responded, and she'd felt a chill go through her. But she hadn't thought they'd go this far. And now they had, and there was blackness at the edges of her vision, which only made her panic more, trying to breathe in oxygen that wasn't there. She heard the gunshot just before she lost consciousness.

She came to in the front passenger seat of a BMW, parked in a dim, empty lot. Her first thought was to flee the car; she was a fast runner, perhaps there was a chance she could get away. But then the man in the driver's seat told her she was safe, now, and his eyes were kind.

"I'm Nathan," he said. "I had reason to believe your life was in danger."

"Did John send you?" A little flutter of hope in her chest. Maybe, somehow —

"No. I'm sorry, I can't tell you why I thought you might be in danger," Nathan said, and sighed. "I'm only glad I got here in time."

"Where are we?" She could feel the bruising on her throat as she spoke.

"Outside a medical research facility. To purchase a cadaver."

When he'd said that, she felt certain he was someone from John's world, even if he denied knowing him. It was only later, as she helped him drag a pale, stiff woman of about her height into the house, as she watched him fumble with the safety on his gun before shooting the corpse twice in the head, that she'd realized he had no more idea of what he was doing than she did.

In the end, it was effective, though. He'd cut the gas line and let the gas fill the house for awhile before lighting part of the day's newspaper on fire and flinging it through the front door. The explosion came as they were driving away in the BMW, a shattering noise she could feel even in the car.

Nathan drove the car to an abandoned factory lot in Hoboken, the body of the man who'd attacked her still in the trunk, and they'd cut the fuel line to the car as well, lit a section of newspaper they'd saved, tossed it near the dripping gasoline, and run. It took more than five minutes before the car finally caught fire and blew up, though, and they stood, panting, at the edge of the parking lot, and they laughed. It was a hysterical laughter, born out of the absurdity and horror of the situation, but it was still laughter, and it was refreshing.

Nathan stopped laughing, first, and his face grew haggard as the heat from the car rippled in the early morning sunlight. His hands were shaking at his sides.

"You've never taken a life before, have you?"

"No. This isn't my usual line of work."

"I don't — I have no idea how to thank you for everything you've done for me. You saved my life."

"I had to do something," he'd said, simply, and turned to start walking back towards the city.

They'd checked into the first hotel they could find, a musty room with two faded double beds, and he'd stayed with her until they worked through the details of creating her new life. The bank account in the Caymans he'd had no trouble with, but a forged passport, birth certificate and social security card were more difficult.

Early on, he'd asked her if she wanted her husband to join her in this new life. They could get word to him, he said. She shook her head no. She and Peter had been separated for three months, and although he might still be temporarily devastated when the police knocked on the door to his apartment in Queens, it was for the best. He'd asked her to marry him too soon, but she hadn't been able to say no, and eventually he'd worn her down into a yes. She'd thought she could settle with a man she liked but didn't love, settle and have the house and kids and all the things she'd thought she wanted, but she had been wrong. Better to cut Peter loose. She couldn't ask a man she didn't love to go into hiding with her.

Nathan hadn't told her how much money was in the Caymans account. But he'd handed her a wad of hundred dollar bills to use until she could access it, when he'd finally hugged her goodbye and she'd choked out yet another thank you through her tears, knowing that nothing she could ever say would be adequate for a stranger who had taken a life to save hers.

Two weeks later, she was on her fifth cheap hotel, always moving, afraid to stay in one place for too long. But she'd sucked up her fear long enough to pay cash for a cheap laptop at Radio Shack, and sit at a coffee shop long enough to look up the account on wifi. He'd put a million dollars in there, like it was nothing.

It had been enough to buy the little house on the Sound and still have enough to live on for the rest of her quiet life. And then last year, another million had been deposited there, three months before she'd received a shock in her New York Times. There, on the third page, a picture of him, looking far more put together than when she'd first met him, but it was clear the Nathan who'd saved her life was Nathan Ingram, multi-billionaire software CEO, and he'd died in a hit-and-run car accident.

She'd wondered how a software executive came to know her life was in danger, wondered what had prompted him to seek her out and try to help her. But mostly, she'd felt more lonely on that day than any other. The only person who knew Jessica Arndt was still alive was gone.


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

Reese climbs the library stairs, the marble worn into softly sloping grooves from years of foot traffic, and marvels yet again at whatever legal limbo Finch has managed to set up to keep real estate this valuable from attracting any attention.

Down the book-lined hallway with its faint smell of leather and damp rot, into the room he thinks of as Finch's brain, the man's thoughts splayed out all over bulletin boards and spare wall space and the cracked window.

"Good morning, Mr. Reese. It seems we have a new number, and this one has proven to be quite difficult."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the number is for an Ethel Fielding, and she died in 1988."

"It wouldn't be the first time we've had a number for someone presumed dead."

"Yes, but the problem, Mr. Reese, is Ethel Fielding was, by all accounts, 91 years old when she died."

"So someone's reusing her social security number. Witness protection?"

"No. People in witness protection are invariably given unused social security numbers when they enter the program. Whoever this is, my first guess is it's a perpetrator using a false identity. Someone in your former line of employment, possibly. But I've had a very difficult time getting a name, much less a picture. They've clearly been living off the grid."

"If they were completely off the grid, how would the machine come up with the number?"

"I told you the case was difficult, Mr. Reese." Finch glances back down at his keyboard and begins typing, rapid-fire. "I've struck out at the DMV, the IRS, all the usual locations. I'm trying banks, now, but every firewall is — oh, here were are. An ING account, online-only, smart. Belongs to one Lisa Williams, opened in 2007, supplemented regularly from an offshore account. Our Lisa makes a thousand-dollar withdrawal at a different ATM on Long Island every month."

"Can you get camera footage?"

"Working on it now." Finch resumes his rapid-fire typing, and Reese drifts across the room, restless.

It's been four days since they wrapped up the last number, longer than usual, and he wants to begin. Something tells him that Finch's original assumption of perpetrator is wrong. Not because Lisa Williams is a woman — he's known plenty of women who can and have killed — but because the regular ATM withdrawals don't fit.

If she was for hire, she'd have been paid in cash. And if she was using a cover identity, she'd have made a quick cluster of withdrawals, maxed out the account, and then been done with it. No, Lisa Williams might be using a false identity, but he doesn't think she's going to kill anyone, and that means she's likely to be a victim.

"Ah, here we are," Finch says, as grainy video pops up on his screen. It shows a woman in a Yankees baseball cap and giant sunglasses. Reese can make out blond hair around her temples, but that's about it.

"That's all you've got, Finch? That could be half the women in New York."

Finch offers to try another, but after three more videos of the same, similarly covered-up woman, they agree it's time to try a new tactic. Finch begins searching for real estate rentals and purchases to a Lisa Williams since 2007, a set of results that quickly ticks up in the hundreds on Finch's screen.

Reese leans over Finch's shoulder, which no doubt makes Harold nervous — it doesn't take much to make Harold nervous — and points to one of the results towards the top of the screen.

"That one. Paid in cash just before the ING account was set up," Reese says. October of 2007. Reese can't help but think of where he was then — Islamabad, still reeling from learning about Jessica's death, trying to hold himself together to keep doing his job, because there was nothing left but the job.

"It's possible there was a video camera at the title company. I doubt she would have worn a baseball cap to sign for her new house. I'll see if I can pull better picture while you check it out," Finch says, but Reese is already halfway down the hallway.


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

In more than four years of living in hiding, she's become more cautious. So when she stretches on the porch railing following her run on the beach, and then opens the door to her house, she can sense there is a presence inside. There are the books on her coffee table that she'd left neatly stacked, now skewed at their corners. There is the kitchen light she's fairly certain she turned off. There is what sounds like one of the house's circa-1930 floor beams, creaking overhead.

Although she registers none of these things specifically, they are altogether enough to send her hypothalamus into a state of deeply instinctive overdrive: time for flight, run, run, run.

She spins on her heel and takes off sprinting down the stairs and then the street, the pavement harder on her feet in their Vibrams than the beach was, but she ignores the pain. Jessica usually runs six miles every morning, but with the storm clouds rolling in she'd cut her run in half today, and she's got plenty left in her legs. Running, running, and at first she can hear someone behind her, and she finds a little more speed with the adrenaline surging through her body, cutting down side streets, through back yards. The wind picking up and finally the storm catching her, a thick chilly downpour, but she's grateful for the cover.

By the time she reaches the LIRR station, the rain still swirling around her, whoever it was is gone. She pulls her debit card from her runner's armband and withdraws the limit at the station ATM — $600 isn't much, but it will be enough to hide for awhile.

She rides the train into Grand Central, buys an I Heart NY ball cap and sweatshirt from one of the sidewalk vendors outside the station. Pulls the sweatshirt over her now-chilled skin, shoves the ball cap down on her head, and contemplates her next move.

Well before she reaches the station, Reese has cursed his choice of attire and given up the chase. Usually, his suit-sans-tie and dress shoes with a subtle tread are perfect for the work he needs to do — great for blending in the city, for a short sprint after men larger and slower than he is.

But Lisa Williams, even without the crowds and chaos of Manhattan, is easily faster than him in her running clothes and shoes. He stops at an intersection, contacts Finch to say he's lost her, but Finch tells him she's just used an ATM at the Stony Brook LIRR station, so at least they know she's likely to flee Long Island.

"She was wearing running clothes, no hat," Reese says. "We might be able to get a better picture of her face, if there's video."

"I'm on it," Finch says. Harold Finch likes order, likes things that organize themselves the way they should, and a number with an identity this difficult to acquire bothers him more than he will ever admit to Reese.

When Finch finally pulls up the video, his first reaction is complete shock. Followed immediately by his brain shifting into overdrive, trying to work through the various permutations of how and where he should show Reese what he sees.

He was well aware of Jessica Arndt when he recruited Reese. The man's guilt over not being able to do anything to save her, he'd thought, would make him more likely to join Finch's cause, and ultimately he'd been right. But the video feed is relatively good, as ATM video goes, and this woman is clearly Jessica Arndt.

Finch could tell Reese to come in, show him the video up on his computer monitor, in a more controlled environment. He could try to prepare him over the phone, just send it, risk that Reese will see it and lose control, do something reckless. Or he could simply keep Reese in the dark, keep him in the field, out chasing this woman, let Reese find out — if or when he catches her — exactly who she is.

If Jessica Arndt has been posing as Lisa Williams, though, and Lisa Williams' number has come up, it means her life is in danger. And if Reese can get to her faster by knowing who he's chasing, Finch needs to send it now.

"I have the ATM feed," Finch says. "I'm going to send you a still of it now. Mr. Reese, I want you to be prepared that what you're going to see will be a shock."

He hits send, and there is silence on the phone.


	4. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

Of all the things he'd thought of when Harold told him to be prepared for a shock, this had not been one of them. That she could still be alive, living under a false name in Long Island, that this Lisa Williams could actually be Jessica, had never crossed his mind.

But the dates fit, he realizes, staring at the picture on his phone. Jessica had been "killed" three months before Lisa Williams bought the house he'd just been searching. And although there had been female remains found in her house, there'd been nothing conclusive that it was her. He'd just assumed it was the Agency, being thorough, leaving no evidence. He should have looked closer, thought harder, but he'd been on the other side of the world, and in the distance the news of her death had somehow required less proof.

"Mr. Reese? John, are you okay?"

"Yes, Harold."

A gust of wind and a loud shock of thunder remind him that there's a storm coming, and he resumes running to the LIRR station, inappropriate clothes be damned. She is not dead because of him — she is alive, even if she is not safe, and he can feel hope, hope like he hasn't felt in years, intermingled with worry. He has a second chance, now, and they must find her.

"Finch, dig a little more into that offshore account. She may try to access more of her money outside of the ATM network."

"Yes, I'll look into it."

The storm catches up to him quickly, soaking him through his suit. No sign of her at the LIRR station, and he drips his way through Grand Central and back to the library.

"There are towels in that cabinet over there," Finch says, pointing, and he helps himself to one, dries his face and hair as he walks back over to the computer monitors.

If Reese had any doubt that Jessica was the woman at the ATM, it is gone when he sees the video up on the larger monitor. Her hair is shorter, now, and she looks frightened, but it is clearly her. He was so _close_. He was in her house when she came in the door, and now he's scared the hell out of her and made her run.

"There's something I want to show you," Finch says, minimizing the picture and pulling up the spec for what appears to be an engine. "You've always been operating under the assumption that Jessica was killed because of her past relationship with you. An assumption, I must admit, that I shared. But this is the spec for a Fuller Avionics FA32 engine. As you know, Jessica was working for Fuller at the time of her death."

"She'd been with them for six years," Reese says. "They transferred her to their New York office in 2007."

"Yes, and they had just completed testing on the FA32. Everything I can find indicates that the tests showed a better-than-acceptable failure rate. But when they actually started using the FA32 in the field, on modified Black Hawk helicopters, they lost five helicopters within the first year, all with engine failure."

"We heard about those choppers," Reese says. "Nobody wanted to go near one of them."

"In all, 17 men have died," Finch says, pulling up crash footage on one of the other monitors. "There was a Congressional inquiry, but Fuller was still paid for all of the engines the government contracted for. The company claimed that the Army was failing to maintain the engines properly, given the hazardous conditions they were being used under. But what if there had been problems that appeared when they tested the engine? What if Jessica knew about it and threatened to blow the whistle?"

What if, Finch does not say, that was actually what caused her number to come up in 2007, when he saw her as a pretty face he was unable to save? He merely looks at Reese, waiting for a reaction. For one brief moment, Reese looks as though he might cry in relief, but it passes.

"If she knew Fuller was going to try to kill her, she could have faked her own death," Reese says, "but I think she would have needed help."

Jessica was from the other world, the innocent world. She did not have access to cadavers, to the resources that would have set up this new life. So who was —

Beeping from Harold's computer interrupts his thoughts, as Finch minimizes a Black Hawk crash and pulls up a new window.

"I'm into the offshore account," Finch says. "Looks like one of the Cayman banks. She had 1.6 million dollars in there. And — yes, she just made a wire transfer, $10,000 to a Chase branch on Park Avenue. Intersection of Park and 27th."

But Finch is not the only person watching the offshore account, and Jessica is gone before Reese gets to the bank. This time, she wakes in the back of a cargo van with a blindfold on and a gag in her mouth, and she thinks surely she will die soon — only Nathan would know to save her, and he's gone.


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

Reese scans the streets around the bank, but sees no sign of her. It's strange, now, after spending the morning looking for an unidentified woman, to know _exactly_ what he is looking for. He'll know her, he's certain, even now. He'll know the way she walks, the way she carries herself, gracefully. All he has to do is see a glimpse of her, and he'll know.

"I'm accessing the bank's surveillance cameras," Finch says. "Perhaps we can see what direction she headed."

Silence on the line as Reese continues to scan the streets, vigilant, but fruitless. And then —

"Mr. Reese, we have a problem. She was pulled into a white van about 20 minutes ago. Someone else got to her first. Broad daylight, but it was so fast none of the bystanders even seems to have reacted. One second she's there and the next, she's gone."

"Damn it!"

"I've got a partial license plate off of the van," Finch says. "I'm running it now. You should come back in, John. There's nothing you can do out there right now."

Reese knows he is right, and yet he still can't shake the desire to _do something_. He walks back to where he's parked the latest in a line of throwaway cars, and wants to stop random people in the street, pull his gun on them and ask if they've seen her, ask how a beautiful woman could have been abducted in broad daylight in Manhattan without anyone so much as yelling. Instead he keeps on walking. He should have known this would not be easy.

Jessica, lying prone on the cold metal van floor, can feel it begin to slow beneath her, can see even through the blindfold that they are in a darker place before it stops. The engine cuts out, and she is hauled upwards, out of the van and onto her feet. She stumbles forward, losing the heels that match the suit she'd paid cash for in the vast, tourist-filled anonymity of Macy's.

A hand on the back of her suit collar holds her standing, and another pulls first the blindfold and then the gag from her face. Even in the dark of what she takes to be a warehouse, it takes her eyes awhile to adjust. Standing in front of her is a balding man in a suit not much more expensive than her Macy's special.

"Scream if you like, but no one will hear you, out here. You cooperate with us, and you might just get to live," he says. "You see, Ms. Arndt, we have nothing against you, but we've been looking for a friend of yours for quite some time, and when we discovered you were still alive, we knew the perfect bait had just been dropped into our laps."

"This isn't about Fuller?" she can't help but ask.

"I'm sure there are people who still care about your corrupt little former employer," he says. "But I'm not one of them. We're only interested in the man you knew when he was John Campbell."

Jessica tries not to react — visibly, anyway — but surely the man must see her respond to his name. So he is alive. She hasn't been sure of that, not since she saw John Campbell's name listed among those missing in action in Afghanistan. It was certainly plausible that he was missing and likely dead, but it was also plausible that the CIA, or NSA, or whoever it was he was working for, had done it to create a cover identity. She'd hoped, prayed, he was still alive, but thought she would never know for sure. After all, even if he was alive, he was a world apart from her, and she was officially dead.

"John doesn't even know I'm alive," she tells the man.

"Oh, he will," he says, and pulls out a cell phone, blinding her momentarily with the flash on the camera. "I want two sets of eyes on her at all times."

The balding man strides off, and she is pushed into a corner of the warehouse, thrown down onto a clean-feeling nylon sleeping bag. The man behind her ties her hands tight behind her back, and then her feet, but he does not replace the blindfold or the gag, and for this she is grateful. She curls up on the sleeping bag, but knows she will not sleep tonight.


	6. Chapter 5

AN: This chapter contains Carter-related spoilers for Ep. 17, Baby Blue.

**Chapter 5**

In the library, Finch is crawling through more than a dozen unmarked white vans on the DMV's web site, all of them carrying plates beginning with "DHZ". Still, Reese thinks, walking in and taking a place behind Finch, it's a manageable number. He'll check on all dozen if he has to.

Finch pulls up the next one, mid-way down the list, and all he can manage to say is, "oh." Where the address should be printed, there is a message:

"John: We have Jessica. 0600 tomorrow at the navy yard. Come alone or we kill her."

Below the message, a bitly URL that Finch pulls up in his browser. It's a cell phone photo of her, looking startled and scared, but otherwise unharmed.

"It's Snow," Reese says. "No one else would have the resources to find her, much less turn something like this around in such a short amount of time."

"He would seem to be the most likely candidate."

"I'm going to need new equipment," Reese says, and turns for the hallway.

"John, wait," Finch says, and Reese does stop. "I know this is typically your forte, but I would like to note that if it is Snow, and you go in with guns blazing, you'll give him exactly what he wants, and he'll probably kill both of you."

"You might be right, but I don't have a choice, Finch. I have to try to save her."

"I know Fusco's tied up with H.R. right now, but what about Carter?"

"Carter's made it clear she's done with us." Reese doesn't entirely believe this. Most good, long-term assets, when you take the time to cultivate them, still go through a period of doubt. His plan has been to find the right case that will help them bring Carter back into the fold. But he's fairly sure this isn't the one — it's too messy, too intertwined with his own life.

"You don't really have anything to lose by asking," Finch says.

"Carter could arrest me."

"I doubt she'll do that. And even if she did, she'd still be able to marshal more resources to try to save Jessica tomorrow than we can."

Finch has a point, Reese thinks. And Carter does owe him, when it comes to Snow.

"All right, I'll set up a meet with Carter. But I'm still going to need equipment."

It's 10 p.m. when he meets Carter at the diner, but Reese orders a coffee. He knows he won't sleep tonight, and he doesn't need the sleep. He's spent years testing his body, and he's still a steady shot after 36 hours awake. Beyond that, he can compensate and get by, but the sharpness is gone.

"I thought I told you not to contact me." Carter slides into the booth.

"And yet you're still here, Detective."

"Whatever you tell me," Carter says, "whatever one of your people you want to tell me about, I'm keeping it on the books. I'll say you're a C.I., so no one will know who told me, but anything you say gets known on the Task Force. Immediately. So you better think about that before you say anything else."

Reese doesn't say anything else, not right away. He slides a print of the cell phone photo across the table.

"Her name is Jessica Arndt," he says. For a moment, he freezes, unable to go on. "And Carter, you need to know that she's not just another one of my 'people.' She's —we had a past."

For a moment, Carter looks like she's going to make a comment, her mouth open and her eyes skeptical; he knows what she must be thinking. But she says nothing.

"Until today, I thought she was dead. But she's not. She's been in hiding since 2007 — she threatened to blow the whistle on her company and she must have thought her life was in danger. This afternoon she was taken in broad daylight by men in a white van. We got a partial license plate off of the van, and when we started looking at possibles at the DMV, we found this. We think it's Snow."

The registration, too, goes across the table. He hopes it fills her with as much rage as it has him.

"If you decide to keep this on the books, you need to understand you'll get her killed, one way or another. So if you want to walk away right now, I'll understand. But you need to know that she did nothing to deserve this. She's a completely normal woman who happened to date the wrong person and work for the wrong company."

Reese does not tell her that if she decides to walk away, but still wants to run this by the book, the way the NYPD would any other missing person, he will pull his gun on her, and threaten her to stay away. He would never hurt her, but he's not above threatening, not in these circumstances.

"I still can't figure out whether trouble follows you, or you follow trouble," Carter says, shaking her head and looking at the cell phone photo again. "But if you're telling me this woman didn't do anything to deserve this, I don't have a whole lot of choice, do I? I'll do whatever I can to help you get her back. But then we're done."

"She didn't. They're just using her to get to me. I'm going in tomorrow — I could really use the backup. That's all I need, just backup, as much as you're willing to provide. Wear your vest, don't get too close. When it's all done, you walk away, whatever happens."

"I saw what they did to you last time. They'll shoot you like a dog if you show up there, and then they'll kill her, too. Won't matter if you have backup."

"You're not the first person to tell me that," he says. "But there's nothing else I can do."

"No, you know what, I think you didn't listen to me, the last time I saw you. I think I've got a better idea."


	7. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

Sunrise at the navy yard, but Jessica can't see it. The blindfold and the gag are back on, and she can feel the road getting bumpier beneath her. As she'd expected, she never slept, lying there on the sleeping bag all night, watching the men watching her, wondering again and again if she would die today, if John would show. If she wanted him to.

The van comes to a stop, and for awhile, nothing happens, but she can feel her pulse pounding, and it becomes harder to breathe around the gag. Part of her wishes that if these are her last few minutes to live, this petrifying panic and fear, that they would just kill her now.

And then the rear door to the van is opening, and she is pulled outside, and pushed to walk forward, now in her bare feet, across a stretch of broken, weedy pavement. First the blindfold, and then the gag are pulled from her face, but she hardly notices the gag in the sudden rush of light.

She is still blinking when the sound of a car reaches her, something blue, and the men seem to tense around her. The car continues to pull forward, but then there is an explosion of sound, police cruisers squealing in, gravel flying, sirens on and lights flashing.

A woman steps out of the blue car, strides forward with a confidence that's somehow reassuring to Jessica, although she knows that this is far from over. From the police cars, men in their uniforms jumping out, pulling their guns, pointing them at Jessica and the men.

"Got an anonymous tip that a suspect in one of our ongoing investigations was going to be here this morning," the woman says. "But instead, we roll up and we find you. And a hostage, apparently."

Reese watches all of this from a rooftop a hundred yards away, through the sight of an M24 rifle, listening to Carter through a parabolic mic. His finger tight on the trigger, Snow his target. It would be so easy to pull the trigger, to take revenge for all the things Snow has done, all the things he's attempted to do. But he will do nothing to put this in danger, not while Carter has things under control.

He keeps the gun steady, allows himself one glance up, to look at Jessica. She seems to be holding up, although the man behind her is now holding a Glock to the base of her skull. He shifts the gun's sight slowly over to that man. If things go south, he'll shoot the greatest threat first and hope he still has a clean shot at Snow in the chaos. It is not the best of plans; he hopes deeply that Carter's strategy will work.

"Now we're stuck," Carter says. "Because I don't think our guy is going to show, now that the party's already started. But we've got ourselves a problem. Because you're CIA, and you're operating on American soil. And you have a hostage, who looks like she's probably an American citizen."

Snow says nothing.

"And actually, you've really got a problem, because three of these squad cars have video cameras. I think you know our suspect well enough to know that he's got friends who can have that video up on YouTube within the hour. So you might just want to hand the woman over to us, and we'll keep this quiet, the way you like it."

"Damn, Carter, you're brilliant." Reese glances up from the rifle, wishes he could see Snow's face as he considers what Carter has said. He must know he has no other option, must know his trap has failed.

"Hand her over," Snow says, finally, and the gun is released from Jessica's neck, and the man behind her pushes her forward.

Reese notices her bare feet as she runs on unsteady legs towards Carter, who reaches out her arm and whips Jessica around, so she's now behind Carter. Reese exhales. Carter has her, she is safe. And Snow and his men are already scrambling into their vehicles, speeding off.

When they are gone, finally gone, Carter turns around and puts her arm around Jessica, says something too soft for the parabolic mic to pick up.

"I've got her," Carter announces to the men around her. "She needs medical attention. I'll get her to the hospital. For obvious reasons, you'd all be best to forget what you saw this morning."

Carter ushers Jessica into the back seat of her car, and then the police cruisers are backing up, followed by Carter's Chevy. Reese watches until they drive out of sight before he breaks down the rifle and the microphone, and he can't leave the rooftop without a glance back at the last place he thinks she stood before she got into Carter's car.


	8. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

Jessica sits in the backseat of the car, stunned. No John, and yet she is safe. The woman starts the car, and Jessica decides it would be a good idea to buckle her seat belt, but she can't keep her hands steady enough to push the buckle into place.

"It's okay, don't worry about it. I'll drive slow," the woman says. "I'm Detective Carter, but you can call me Joss. Do you need anything? Do you want some water?"

Joss doesn't wait for her response, just passes back a water bottle. Jessica realizes how good water sounds right now — she hasn't had anything to drink since the small paper cup the bank manager offered her yesterday. She tips the bottle back and drinks greedily, and the water settles rough on her long-empty stomach.

It isn't long before she's asking Joss to pull over the car; she thinks she's going to be sick. Jessica is barely able to get the door open before she throws up in the long grass on the side of the road. Joss waits until she's finished, rinsed her mouth out, and pulled the door back closed behind her before speaking:

"Normally, I'd have called for an ambulance, but I didn't want to wait around for those guys to change their minds. You need IV fluids, at the very least. I'm going to have to take your statement, in case one of the officers decides to get stupid and speak up. But it's going to be better for everyone if you slip away at the hospital."

Jessica wants to ask if John has sent Joss, but she's asked that question once before, and she can't take another response in the negative.

"Where should I go, when I slip away?" Back to the loneliness, she suspects, if not back to the house on the Sound. Back to hiding, the way she did in the days after Nathan left her, back to John at the fringes of her life, never to intervene. But doesn't she deserve to at least see him? After everything she's been through, if he's alive —

"Just walk out and keep walking," Joss says. "He'll find you."

"John?"

"Yes," Joss says, and her tone seems curt. "John."

Jessica smiles faintly in the energy she has left, lays down on the back seat, tears in her eyes, doesn't even realize she's fallen asleep until Joss is gently shaking her shoulder, telling her to wake up.

"You need a stretcher?"

No, she says, but she has to lean on Joss as they walk into the emergency room. Joss flashes an NYPD badge and that garners them a curtained-off space and an IV in her arm soon after she sits down.

Some time later, a young doctor slips into the curtain with a lighted scope for her ears, nose, and throat, pronounces her dehydrated, nothing more, and leaves. He is followed by a nurse, who changes her empty IV bag, and then Joss, who's managed to step out and return with a set of blue surgical scrubs and cheap plastic hospital slippers.

"Best I could find," she says. "You feeling better? Think I can take your statement now?"

"Yeah," Jessica nods. She wants more sleep and a shower, but at least the chalky taste is gone from her mouth, and her stomach is no longer wrenching occasionally.

Joss pulls out a little spiral-bound notebook, tells her to think carefully about what she says, and proceeds to scribble her way through the notebook as Jessica tells her bits and pieces of what happened to her that seem to be safe to be recorded for posterity. The second IV bag narrows as she talks.

"You think you could eat something?" Joss asks, a peculiar look on her face. "I could go to the vending machine down the hall, get you something."

This is when she should slip away, Jessica realizes, and she nods, waits until Joss slips through the curtain, and pulls the IV needle from her arm. The bag is nearly empty, and she feels much better, although hollow, rootless, as though she is a pinball that will ricochet out of here.

There is a little blood, where the IV needle was, but she takes some gauze from the metal cart in her curtained area, tapes it on and changes into the scrubs. Walks out of the room with her chafed feet wobbling in the oversized hospital slippers. Out into the waiting area, and then, when no one stops her, out of the emergency room.

Past the ambulances, unloading their patients with sharp staccato commands, past the benches, with the unhealthy sitting there, trying to take in the fresh air. Out to the street, thinking of Joss' words: "He'll find you."

The black Town Car is not what she's expected, and she freezes as it pulls up beside her, ready to run back to the hospital and try to find Joss. But then the door opens and she realizes it's John, motioning to her to get into the car.

She slips in, and for a moment after she closes the door behind herself, just stares at him. For so long he's seemed a figment, a story of someone she loved, that it seems impossible he is here, and real. Briefly, she is shocked by his face, by how much he's aged since she saw him last.

Perhaps that's unfair. It's been five years, and the shock of seeing him in the airport, those few minutes of conversation, didn't allow much time for observation. Certainly she's aged, as well, but John looks like he's been through five very rough years. And yet he still looks good, she thinks, still looks enough like the man in the army uniform who'd caught her attention ten years ago.

Of the two of them, she would have thought she'd be the one to break down. And she does cry when he locks his arms around her in a tight embrace, cries for the feeling of finally being truly safe; she has some sense of what he's capable of, and no one will get to her, now. But John is the one who presses his head into her shoulder, audibly weeping. She hears a faint electronic whirring as the driver closes the privacy barrier, and she is alone with the man who'd hurt her more than she thought possible, the man she still can't help but love, in spite of this.


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

There are a number of things that destroyed John Reese, that turned him into a homeless man just looking to score enough money to buy his next fifth, enough money for one little bottle of oblivion. But of all the things along his spiral downward, none did more damage than the slip of paper Cara Stanton handed him when he returned to the safe house in Islamabad.

"Burn it when you're done," she'd said. "Take the night off. Try not to do anything rash."

Although he'd reeled when he read the details of Jessica's death, the burnt body with the gunshot wound to the head, he hadn't taken Cara's word for it. She'd been insistent about him cutting off all ties, and Jessica had always been the most difficult tie to cut. So he'd booked half an hour at an internet cafe, a grotty little place in the center of the city used only by locals, and confirmed it was true. And then he'd bought a bottle of unlabeled back-alley vodka, checked into a cheap hotel, and drank himself unconscious for the first time.

Now, to have that entire event invalidated, to know not only that she wasn't killed because of him, but that she is alive, here, real, in his arms, produces a sense of relief in him more profound than any he's ever known. He breaks down, pulls her closer, desperately closer, and feels some distant sense of gratitude towards Finch when he hears the privacy divider go up. Finch doesn't need to see him like this.

Some time later — it could be minutes, it could be an hour — when the flood of relief recedes, just a bit, he pulls back from her, wipes at his damp face with his hands, and realizes he has no idea what to say. That he's deeply relieved she's alive does not need to be voiced.

"Are you all right?" he finally asks, for lack of anything else. "We didn't expect you to be in the hospital for so long."

"Just dehydrated — they gave me an IV. And tired."

"We'll get you someplace safe so you can rest," he says.

She's beyond tired, he realizes. He's been so focused on the simple things — that she is alive, and here in the car — that he hasn't really looked at her.

He's seen her exhausted before, six in the morning, satiated, soft sleepy eyes and a quiet little smile on her face, after the nights they used to stay up making love and talking. This is not that sort of exhausted. This is the exhausted he sees in the numbers he helps, the way the body deflates when the adrenaline and the fear are gone.

"John, I wanted to live, this morning," she says. "But I didn't want you to give yourself up for me. I don't know why those men wanted you, but I know whatever you've done — if you've even done anything — you must have had a reason for it."

"It's complicated, he says. "But there was never a reason for anything that was more important than your life."

He doesn't want to talk about anything he may or may not have done in the last few years now, maybe not ever, so he lets the conversation lapse as the car creeps along in the traffic towards midtown. Finally, when it seems enough time has passed, he asks her:

"Jess, what happened in 2007? What made you go into hiding?"

"Do you know anything about the FA32 engine that Fuller was working on? For the Black Hawk?"

"Yes, we looked into it when we were looking for you."

"It failed in testing, terribly. Fuller was trying to cover it up. I went to my boss and threatened to go to the government, but he indicated that there were people in the government that already knew, that he'd bribed them. A couple days later I came home and there was a man in my house. He tried to kill me — he almost succeeded."

"How did you get away?"

"Another man intervened. He killed him, and then he helped me fake my own death, to get away. I never figured out how he knew to be there — I found out later he was some software executive. But he told me he had reason to believe my was in danger."

Reese knows enough about Finch's past for a cold chill to run through him when she mentions a software executive, but he asks anyway. "Did he give you his name, this man that helped you?"

"Yes, Nathan," she says. "I saw a newspaper article in 2010, that he had died. That's when I found out his full name was Nathan Ingram."

The car swerves violently for a moment, confirmation that Finch can still hear at least some of the conversation. Jessica dives for the door handle; he has to grab her arm to keep her from opening the car door, and he realizes now that she is no longer part of the innocent world, hasn't been for quite some time. Even if she has done nothing, she is as wary as him, as Finch, as anyone he's worked with in the Agency.

"John, we have to go —"

"Stay, it's okay. We won't let anything happen to you."

"Who is this 'we' you keep talking about? Who else knows about me?"

"Harold, my —" Friend, no. Boss, no. There is no good way to describe Finch. " — associate, is driving. You've already met Detective Carter. That's it, aside from the men who took you, and we'll find a way to deal with them."

Reese does not tell her that his current plan for "deal with them" involves finding Snow & Company again with his M24, if that's what it takes to keep her safe. But slowly, she releases her hand from the car door, relaxes back against the leather seat.

He wants to tell her she shouldn't doubt that she's safe now, that now that he has been absolved of her death, there is nothing he won't do to keep her alive. But all he can manage to do is reach out and take her hand in his, squeeze tight and hope she understands.


	10. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

Finch rolls down the privacy barrier as they reach their destination, ready for his defense as soon as Reese notices.

"The Pierre, really, Harold?"

"I know your preference is for run-down old holes where you think you can hide better, John, but I might note that the staff at a luxury hotel is actually better at looking the other way when they see something out of the norm. Say, a doctor walking in wearing a pair of hospital slippers. I've taken the liberty of booking you for a week. Dr. and Mr. Johnson."

Finch passes a keycard into Reese's hand — he's also taken the liberty of hacking the hotel's system and checking them in already. Reese doesn't protest, but Finch also suspects that he'll move them well before the week is up. Finch shifts his focus in the rear view mirror to what he's been curious about the whole drive, Jessica Arndt.

The number Nathan managed to save. Finch had forgotten her number had been up on the screen when Nathan confronted him about the irrelevant list. He suspects she was the first person Nathan saved, but was she the last? Was Nathan trying to save numbers in those years before his death?

After Nathan had confronted Finch, he'd become more distant, checking in only every few days, sometimes once a week. Finch had assumed it was his anger over the irrelevant list, but what if Nathan had been out trying to save the numbers during that time?

And what if one of the numbers Nathan tried to save had ultimately been what got him killed? Finch was certain it was the machine, somehow finding a way to defend itself from what it perceived to be a threat, somehow routing death Nathan's way. Finch will never forget the sight of the driverless truck looming in the window, approaching Nathan in the driver's seat, that moment of horror before disaster and death.

It's a small comfort, as he pulls the car in front of the hotel entrance, to think that such a moment may not have come from the machine he'd created, at least in as direct a way as he'd thought. If Nathan was doing what he is doing now, trying to save the numbers, then Nathan may well have died in the same way Finch assumes he will, someday, by intervening with the wrong number.

He considers these things as he watches them enter the hotel, and he can't help but watch Jessica in her ill-fitting blue scrubs until she is out of sight. Any other numbers out there are speculation, but she _has_ been saved by Nathan. Part of Finch has been steeped in years of computer science, years of statistics and probabilities, all of the skills he needed to build the machine, and that part bristles at the circumstances. But the part of Finch that reads voraciously and collects first editions of classic literature tells himself that perhaps, somehow, this was meant to be, and for now, that part of him is winning.

Finch pulls the car out into traffic and works his way down to Saks, where he valets the car, and walks into the store, relieved to be done with driving for awhile. He hates driving, especially in the city — there's a reason why he has a driver on call, all the time — but more and more of what they do require a level of discretion he doesn't trust any of his drivers to have.

This part, at least, is simple. He pulls aside a personal shopper, a slim brunette woman with a "Leslie" name tag he gauges to be near Jessica's age, and tells her the airline has lost his clients' luggage and they need things to get them through the next few days: clothes, shoes, new suitcases. It takes her an hour to gather up everything he's asked for; he thanks her and tips her very well.

There are more things Finch needs to do immediately for them — a stop at a pharmacy with the small bag he'd asked Leslie to leave empty, and then back to the hotel to drop off the luggage. But Finch's mind is already turning to the longer-term problem they have: Snow is not going to leave things like this. If Finch can't find a way to divert him, he'll continue to be a problem for Reese, Jessica, Carter, all of them.

Reese likes to joke that there is no machine, only Harold, but there is some truth to this. Finch is the one who built it up from nothing over the years, who created what may be the most complex artificial intelligence in the world, who then trained it, painstakingly, to think the same way Finch would, but with the ability to process several trillion times the input a normal human can.

The machine would be able to find something on Mark Snow, Finch is certain, if it was still an open system and he gave it the right instructions. Given enough time and patience, Finch will be able to do the same, and he wants nothing more than to be done with these errands so he can get back to the library and begin.


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

Jessica wakes with sunlight faintly visible around the edges of the blackout curtain, and rolls over to check the clock on the nightstand. 6:12 a.m. — she's been asleep for almost 14 hours.

In the end, she'd made a shower her first priority, and then food, mostly because John had ordered a plain omelette from room service and told her to eat at least half of it: "you need simple protein." Then, finally, sleep — deep, bottomless sleep in the plush hotel bed, wrapped in an even more plush hotel robe.

She rises, nearly manages to tiptoe into the bathroom without waking John, asleep on the couch in the living room of the suite, his gun on the floor beside him. But the bathroom door creaks, just a little, as she opens it, and he is up, the gun pointed at the source of the noise, impossibly fast.

"Sorry," he says, simply, setting the gun on the end table beside him.

"Um, good morning?" She smiles, holds his gaze until he smiles back, softens a little. He looks better this morning, less haggard.

In the car, he'd clung to her like she was the rock that was his last hold before slipping off of a cliff, but since they've been in the room, he's been careful about keeping his distance, treating her more like an ex-hostage than an ex-girlfriend, standing near the door to the suite with the gun in his hand and admonishing her to eat protein.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Yes," she says. Better than she has in years, between the exhaustion and the feeling of security, of knowing that anyone who tried to get into the room would have to get past John before they could get to her. She points to the set of designer luggage placed neatly just inside the door. "Too well, apparently."

"Harold delivered them last night. I think he emptied an entire Duane Reade into that small one, there."

She laughs, more to encourage him than because this, specifically, is funny. One of the things she loved most about him was his sense of humor, and she's wondered if it's been destroyed by whatever has happened to him in the last few years.

He smiles back at her, but then they float through a morning of awkwardness:

Who should take the first turn in the bathroom — he defers to her. Digging through the carefully packed suitcase of women's clothing, trying to find something suitably casual for sitting in a hotel room all day, in hiding, finally deciding on a thin cashmere sweater and an inappropriately expensive pair of jeans. Jessica sitting stiffly on the couch during his turn in the bathroom, until he emerges wearing a suit nearly identical to the one he'd been wearing before, but with a different shirt. Breakfast at the suite's little table, trying to pull together little scraps of conversation when it becomes clear neither of them is brave enough to broach the serious stuff.

She's always wanted to see him again, but suddenly being thrown together to live indefinitely in the same space is too much. They need distance, space to move apart and then come back together, and it's clear they won't have it here. Jessica wonders if she'll need the novels this Harold person thoughtfully included in her suitcase, even if just as a prop to make it seem like her attention isn't always focused on him, with nothing to say.

"Is there any connection between Harold and Nathan?" she asks, finally. It seems like a good topic, perhaps not safe, but at least nothing that directly involves her and John.

John has been standing by the window, watching the city street below, but he looks sharply over at her on the couch when she asks the question.

"What makes you think that?"

"Come on, John, I've only known two people with that kind of money to throw around, and it's the two of them. And yesterday when I mentioned Nathan's name, the car swerved. I was so out of it at the time, I thought they were back, trying to run us off the road, but now I'm wondering if it wasn't something else."

"They were business partners," John says.

"Were they in the business of saving people's lives and putting them into hiding? Because that's all I've seen either of them do."

"It's complicated. It's not really my place to tell you more," he says, with a finality that tells her she'll get no more out of this little thread of conversation.

"Do you know how long we'll have to stay here?" she asks, instead.

"We'll have a better idea when we figure out what Snow's next move is."

"Snow is the leader of the men who took me?"

"Yes."

So now at least she has a name for the balding man, but little else. She can see John drifting away, now, the way she felt it when he left the first time. He'd seemed fine, the first year after he reenlisted, emailed her frequently, came back on furlough as the same John she'd remembered, if a little haunted by whatever it was he'd been through over there.

The second year, his emails seemed a little more labored, a little too filled with what seemed like false cheer. She was watching the news. She had some idea of what he was going through, but the actual combat began to disappear more and more from his emails, and they grew short, less frequent, mostly about the heat and the sand and how terrible the food was.

By his next furlough, he was completely taciturn, closing up at every attempt she made to get him to talk. And then he'd disappeared. She can still remember the hot flush of embarrassment when she'd called his father in desperation and received a gruff response that John had already said his goodbyes to what little family he had and flown back. She'd drafted any number of emails, trying to tell him how hurt and angry she was, to tell him that he needed to talk to someone, even if it wasn't her, because he couldn't keep everything bottled up forever.

But she never managed to send one, and now here he is, unable to even sit down with her, with a look on the half of his face she can see that says he has far, far more bottled up than he did in those days. Yesterday, in the car, she'd thought maybe that was a breakthrough, and maybe it was; she has no idea what he's been like these last few years. And maybe she should try to be patient, get one of Harold's books out of the suitcase and wait until John is willing to talk. But what if he's never ready to talk?

She's about to get up and walk over to the suitcases when he turns and tells her they should think about ordering lunch, what would she like, and despite every intent she had of being patient, it's the emails and the terrible food in the canteen again, and something inside her wants to hurt him the way he's hurt her.

"Damn it, John, is that all we're ever going to talk about here? Food? Both of us are supposed to be dead and it's sandwiches or salads?"

He doesn't react, except in his eyes, and this is how she can tell she's wounded him, but she can't tell yet if that's progress or just going to make things worse.

"This is what you do, John, you distance yourself. Even when you're in the same room as me you distance yourself. The least you could do is tell me why."


	12. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

Reese has been punched, kicked, shot, tortured in almost every way imaginable. None of them hurt in this way, this expanding hollowness in his chest, this tightening of his throat. This room, fussy with faux antiques, was already feeling claustrophobic, but now it actually hurts to breathe.

The truth is, he's afraid of her, and he's afraid to speak. As long as he doesn't speak, he doesn't have to tell her all of the things he's done. As long as he doesn't speak, he can remain at a point in time somewhere before he loses her again.

Because that, Reese is certain, is how this will end. Somehow, he's going to lose her again. She'll still be angry he left her all those years ago. She'll hate the things he's done, the person he's become. And his second chance will collapse into dust, slip through his fingers, spread roiling clouds over the expensive carpet.

But he's been wrong; he's been losing her ever since they walked through the door, losing her with silence. The last time he saw her, she criticized him for not having the courage to ask her to wait for him, and she was right. Reese has faced down any number of dangerous situations without fear because he's had nothing to lose. Now, faced with a very real, very precious thing to lose, he has no courage.

And yet, even if he lacks courage, at least he still has the fear, and the fear is enough to make him step away from the window. How can he tell her? How can he tell her that to understand where he is, you have to understand what it is to be in the middle of the ocean. Not above the surface, treading water, but truly in the middle of the ocean, below the surface, fathoms deep, alone in the nothingness and looking up, seeing the light and knowing that you want nothing more than to be in the light.

But each attempt to swim up, to escape, to go towards the light, only results in you being pulled down, farther and farther, until you are on the ocean floor, and the light is so very far away, so far that you know will never escape. And so you stay on the ocean floor, and you are very, very lucky when someone comes along and shows you that even here, you can do the only thing you ever wanted to do in the first place: protect people, save lives. You will never reach the surface, but at least this is something. Something to live for, here on the ocean floor, with the water pushing in on you.

This is not something he can explain. Not immediately, the way she wants him to. So he goes back, farther, to the things that nearly destroyed him back then, and seem so basic, so innocuous now. He takes the few steps to the couch and sits down beside her and tells her that although he'd been in combat before, it was nothing like this, choking on your own fear for days at a time, death behind every window, in every car on the streets. He tells her about the young Iraqi men wearing vests packed with C4, and the men those vests killed, and the way it feels to enter an apartment complex in Ramadi with nothing but dead soldiers and missing limbs and revenge on your mind.

And she does not flinch. She does not flinch and she asks him why he couldn't tell her about this, back when they were together, back when she might have helped him. I don't know, he says, because he doesn't know how to explain that he was already sinking.

He tells her about how he took six months of leave to go back to Connecticut and sit beside his father, dying in a hospital bed, and that of all the deaths he's seen, the slow deaths, the quick deaths, the one constant has been pain. He tells her about watching them disconnect his father's respirator, about the desperate, gasping breaths around the tumor in his throat. About the realization when they turned the crank to put the casket in the ground that he'd never cried.

He tells her about rejoining his unit, now in Afghanistan. About the mission where he was taken by insurgents and shocked, over and over and over again, with a rusted pair of jumper cables attached to a truck battery. About the fuzzy sensation of being rescued, about waking in a hospital bed to find a man in a black suit sitting beside him.

We're impressed with the way you held up back there, son, the man told him. Reese may have added the "son" in his mind, later, he tells her, but that was the tone: we like your background, son; the CIA would like to make you a job offer, son; now you can make a _real_ difference for your country, son.

He tells her about the year of training, the sleep deprivation and days and nights spent crawling through a swamp, still not nearly as bad as an active war zone. Like a year off, he says, and he almost manages to smile. And then he stops, because now he must tell her he is a killer.

She reaches out, takes his hand, tells him it's okay, to keep going. Don't, he thinks, don't try to pull me up from here, because I will just pull you down with me. And maybe she's not part of the innocent world anymore, but she doesn't belong at the bottom of the ocean.

Reese has killed more than two hundred people in his life, but the greater number of them have been on the battlefield, in war, where the kills still make you wake up occasionally in a cold sweat, even in the desert, but there's always some semblance of rules of engagement, even in a guerrilla war. In war, everyone sets himself up to kill or be killed.

But there are 25 men and 3 women he has killed, with premeditation. Killed in cold blood, killed under orders from his CIA handlers. He's killed them with a sniper rifle from the rooftop of a nearby building. He's killed them with poison slipped in their drinks and quick-slip injections in thick crowds. He's killed them with guns and knives at close range, and disposed of the bodies in ways that made him feel like even less of a human than the actual kills did.

And there was the time he came to realize that none of it was what he'd signed up for. None of it was what the man in the black suit had promised, son, and if this was what it took to serve his country, then he couldn't believe in his country anymore. There was the growing realization that perhaps his country wasn't giving the orders, perhaps this didn't just _feel_ illegal, perhaps this actually _was_ illegal, that somehow he'd signed on with some rogue faction, some group serving its own interests, under the auspices of the CIA, perhaps, but off the books.

There was the day he walked into the safehouse in Calexico, and found Cara Stanton's bullet-riddled body on the floor, and known in an instant that they were going to burn him, that they would not tolerate an unfaithful soldier fighting in whatever war this was.

This is what he tells her, and she whispers, "Oh, John," but she does not release his hand.


	13. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

Of course Jessica is horrified. There is no way she could not be horrified. But her reaction is tempered by the knowledge that someone has killed for her, has taken a life so that she can live. Tempered by the night she spent helping Nathan Ingram carry dead bodies from car trunk to house, house to car trunk.

No, the horror is for John, not of him. For the man fraught with guilt as they'd sat in that hotel room in Puerto Vallarta, fixated on the television screen as the towers burned and fell in clouds of ash and dust, for the man who felt he'd quit his country in its time of need. Who'd told her days later, in a broken voice, that he had to reenlist, he was so sorry, but he had to.

All that man had ever wanted to do was serve his country, was keep people like her safe. And if his country — or the men who would use it as an excuse — had betrayed him, it was not his fault. She can't ignore that he is a changed man, now, a man who has looked people in the eye and then killed them. Not just once, like Nathan, but over and over and over again. But she can hear the loss in that change in his voice, and she can feel it when he speaks, and she does not want to give up on him.

"You can't blame yourself, John. You were following orders. You were doing what you thought was right."

"No, I was either following orders or I was doing what I thought was right. They were never the same thing. Maybe that's why they get people who are ex-military to do what I did. We're so used to following orders that we don't start thinking — really thinking — until we're in too deep."

"But you did start thinking. You got out."

"Not as quickly as I should have," he says. "I don't think you can understand what it's like, Jess, to regret most of what you've done for an entire decade."

I can understand, she thinks, I regret the emails I didn't send and walking away from you at the airport and marrying Peter even though I didn't love him. But all of these things seem too trivial compared to the things he regrets, and so she says nothing, just reaches out and touches his cheek with her free hand. And then before she can stop to think that this is a bad idea, that this is too soon, she is leaning in and kissing him, and he is kissing her back, and for a moment it is just like it was.

It's been a very long time since she's kissed anyone — Lisa Williams never dated, she considered it too dangerous — much less someone she cares this much about, and the way his mouth opens to hers makes her almost dizzy with sensation. But then he is shifting closer to her, caressing her neck. And despite her every effort to tell herself that this is John, that no matter what he's done, he would never hurt her, she still tenses, and he notices, breaks away. Removes his hand, to her relief.

"I'm so sorry, Jess, I never should have presumed — "

"No, it's not what you think — you couldn't have known." She takes a deep breath, comforts herself with the sensation of her lungs filling with air. "I can't stand anything touching my throat, even turtlenecks or short necklaces. Ever since that man tried to choke me to death."

He is silent for awhile, and then he tells her there was something he left out, earlier, when he was talking about his time in the CIA. He tells her about being in Islamabad, and learning of her death, of being devastated. Of being certain that it was somehow connected to the work he was doing, either retaliation for someone he'd killed, or someone at the Agency wanting to sever his last tie to his old life, remove the distraction she'd always been.

This stuns her, because by the time of her "death," she'd assumed she was nothing more than an occasional thought — if that — for him. Certainly not a distraction, and certainly not someone anyone would consider killing to get back at him. Eventually, her voice wobbling, she tells him this.

"Jess, I pushed you away, but I never stopped loving you," he says.

At this revelation, part of her wants to kiss him again, and part of her wants to scream at him, tell him he couldn't have loved her that much if he could just leave her without even saying goodbye. Eventually, she compromises, asks him why he pushed her away.

"I could feel the person I was turning into," he says, "and that wasn't a person who deserved someone like you. I thought it was better for you if I just let you go."

"Don't you think you should have let me make that decision?"

"I told you I regretted most of what I've done over the last decade, Jess."

He rises from the couch, squeezes her shoulder gently before walking back over to the window, leaving her to sit there with tears in her eyes. For years, she's wanted an explanation from him, she's wanted to berate him for leaving her, for hurting her. But this is enough, this simple statement; she has no desire to push him further, not when he's been through so much.

She wants to go to him, at the window, and tell him this, but she senses he needs the distance. Leaves him alone for awhile, as the late-afternoon sun shifts across the room, until finally hunger gets the better of her and she is the one to suggest maybe they should actually order some room service.

It's over this lunch that's nearly late enough to be dinner that she broaches the subject of Harold again. She makes no mention of Nathan this time, just asks what John's connection is to Harold. This much, at least, she feels she deserves to know, given how much Harold knows about her.

He hesitates for a moment, but then he tells her that he works with Harold — for Harold, really, since Harold is funding everything. And then he explains what _everything_ is, that they help people, people whose lives are in danger. People like me, she says with a faint smile, and takes a sip of her wine, glad he thought to order it. It adds to the lingering strangeness of everything, to be sitting down to a nice meal with John, drinking wine after everything that's happened in the last few days, but it seems to be draining the last lingering tension from his face.

Yes, people like you, he confirms. But when she asks him how they know who to help, thinking — and he must know she's thinking of it — of how Nathan appeared mysteriously in her house at just the right time, he freezes up again.

"I need for you to accept that there are some things it's not my place to tell you, Jess."

She nods; after everything he's told her today — after he's opened up far more than she ever would have expected — it seems fair to allow him this secret, although she can't help but wonder why he is either unwilling or unable to tell her about this particular thing.

After they've eaten, after he's deposited the tray in the hallway with his gun tucked under his belt, hidden by his suit — all that caution just to open the door — she realizes that she very much wants to kiss him again. Some of this is the half-bottle of wine she's consumed, but mostly it is the sense of how much she's missed him, rushing up and overwhelming her. The sense that they are in a comfortable place, that although there will be new little details they will share over the next few days, all of the important things have been said.

She's trying to decide how to tell him this when his phone rings, he answers, and delves into what sounds like an argument with Harold about how now is not really a good time. It seems Harold wins the argument, though, because John turns to her and tells her he needs to take this call; it may be awhile.

Jessica can sense he wants privacy, and considers retreating to the bedroom with one of the books. She decides it's better to shower instead, the hot water beating down on her shoulders, drowning out whatever John is talking about with Harold. She dries herself quickly after she steps out of the shower, pulls on the hotel bathrobe, and turns on the hair dryer, something else to mask the conversation outside.

It's not enough to mask the sound of John shouting, though, out-and-out shouting, and when she hears this she punches the off button on the hair dryer and bursts out of the bathroom. Not the greatest plan, she realizes in hindsight — if he was shouting at someone who'd come into the room, it would have been best for her to stay hidden. There's not much she's going to be able to add to a fight.

But no, he's shouting into his phone: " — and I'm done talking about it!" And then pressing end, looking for a moment like he's going to throw the phone down before he calms slightly, places it back in his suit pocket.

"Is everything okay, John?"

"It's fine, just Harold being a pain in the ass."

She watches as his agitation ebbs, and then it comes to her, and although she's afraid to ask, she does anyway:

"It's not another person, is it? Another person who needs your help?"

"No, although that may happen, and we'll have to decide how to deal with it if it does." He glances down at her hand, still holding her brush, and smirks. "If there was really something happening out here, were you going to beat people off with your hairbrush?"

"Hey, my brush skills have gotten pretty good in the last few years," she smiles back, and it's lovely, this moment of lightness, but then she can feel his gaze grow serious. And she can feel it, the way he wants her, can see it in his eyes, and it's reassuring that after all of these years, at least this one thing has not changed. Still, she approaches slowly, stops just in front of him.

"I should have told you earlier — I never stopped loving you, either," she whispers. "And I missed you, so much."

He moves first, this time, kissing her with a fervor that makes her drop the brush in surprise. It hits her foot before the floor, but she doesn't care, because this, this, is what she's thought about every time he's crossed her mind, this is what she's longed for, and it is so much better than she's remembered.

She can tell he's being careful to avoid her neck, her throat, but she can feel his hands everywhere else. Hands that have killed so many people, but she tries not to think of that right now, pushes it to the far corners of her mind, focuses instead on the hard muscle of his shoulders beneath her own hands. And maybe things are moving too fast, she thinks, but then again maybe they are many years behind, and this is catching up.

His mouth hot on hers, and one of his hands is reaching for her thigh, now, pushing through the folds of her robe, stroking her bare skin. For the woman who has been lonely Lisa Williams for the last four years, this is almost too much, but she pulls him closer anyway.


	14. Chapter 13

AN: So things have gone a little off-canon, but we're nearly at the end anyway...

**Chapter 13**

With Reese holed up in the hotel room, Finch goes about things the way he prefers: slow, quiet, methodical. He spends the better part of the first night and the day after in the usual places, delicately opening the back doors to any number of sites he'd never planned to enter again without a very good reason.

He manages to get to the fringes of Snow's life, longing for the days when he could type in a social security number and know _everything_, immediately. He still could, if he swung open that particular back door, but that is for absolute emergencies, only — the only time he ever intends to open it beyond the number feed is if he has to shut the whole thing down, command the machine to fry itself and hope it hasn't grown so independent that it will no longer listen.

When he realizes it could take weeks before he gets to anything of substance, he decides to speed things along, calls Reese and pokes and prods at the unknown patches of his CIA past, until Reese finally blows up and hangs up on him. And now, with new angles, new directions, he goes back in.

All the while, waiting for the beep, fearing the beep that will tell him there's another number, still undecided as to what he'll do if it comes. Probably hand the whole thing over to Carter, part and parcel, see if she can prove she's right that the police can handle it.

But the beep never comes, and four days after he dropped Reese and Jessica off at the hotel, he pries the one little nugget he needs out of the mass of data. There, still buried in AT&T's servers, is the voicemail Cara Stanton left on a prepaid burner phone that must have been Reese's.

Reese must have destroyed the phone before hearing it, Finch thinks, because surely he would have mentioned it — unless that had been why he'd hung up. But if Reese has heard the message, he never needs to again, and if he hasn't, he never will. Finch does not want to listen to it, but he does, all the way through.

Stanton starts, breathless, by telling Reese they've been burned, not to come back to the safehouse, to go to ground. She screams, then, and the phone goes skittering across the floor, so the audio sounds more distant as there's a sound of a scuffle, and then a body hitting the floor.

The sound of two silenced gunshots, and then ragged, wet coughing. Repeated thumps — perhaps the person on the floor being kicked, and a noise closer to a wounded animal than a human. Then, mercifully, the thumping stops.

"You bastard. We weren't under Agency orders," Stanton chokes out, "We never were, and you knew, you always knew."

"The Agency's just a figurehead," a man says, and the voice is clearly Snow's. "The Consortium always gets the real work done."

"Illegally," Stanton says with a steely voice that earns Finch's admiration, before she descends into a fit of coughing.

"Shame you had to grow a conscience, Cara," Snow says. "At one point we were thinking you had the potential to move up in the organization. But then you had to start asking questions, and now we're going to have to put an end to you and your soldier."

"He doesn't know anything. Leave him out of this."

"Sorry, Cara, even if I believed you, we always tie up all the loose ends. You should just be glad I'm pressed for time, or we'd take this a lot slower, see if I could get anything useful out of you. Any last words?"

"See you in hell, Mark."

Two more silenced shots, in quick succession — head shots, Finch assumes, because then the only noise is a set of footsteps, walking away. Then 16 minutes of silence, followed by the sound of the door opening again. Perhaps it is Reese, but the message hits the time limit and beeps off.

Finch unclenches his fists slowly, one joint at a time, stares at the little crescent moons his nails have left in his palms. Exhales slowly, waits for a mild wave of nausea to cease. It's not the first time he's heard someone die. Before Reese, he listened to and even saw quite a few of the irrelevant list deaths, in voicemail audio like this, surveillance camera video, the occasional wiretap. It never gets any easier.

When the disgust has passed, he considers what to do. It's sloppy tradecraft, not to have checked the phone, not to have deleted the voicemail, permanently — surely if Finch could get to it, Snow and whatever this Consortium is could have done so — but then, there's always been a note of sloppiness about Snow, Finch thinks. And this is exactly what he needs; now, he just has to be careful about what he does with it.

When he finally contacts Snow, he does it through a string of proxy servers, one that circles the globe three times, each sufficiently booby-trapped to ensure that Snow and his Consortium will never, ever, trace it back to the library.

It's tempting to make a VOIP call, so that he can hear Snow's reaction, but it's safer to use email, and Finch always prefers the safer option. He sends an email to one of the active addresses he's found for Snow, with the audio file attached:

"Clear out of New York. Call off the hunt. Still deciding where to send this if you do not. Tell me, what would be worse for you? I have contacts at the NSA I know are not in your little consortium, but then, CNN is so very tempting."

He receives no response, but this doesn't surprise him.

So Finch digs back through his video archives, finds the footage of Carter, calling Snow, runs it through a script that extracts the phone number from the tones she dials. Calls that through VOIP, to hear an automated voice tell him it's been disconnected. Then, finally, he smiles and rises stiffly from his desk.


	15. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14**

Finch drives them himself, back to the house on the Sound. Snow may be neutralized, but he still hasn't assessed the extent of any lingering threat from Fuller Avionics, and until that happens, Jessica must remain Lisa Williams to the rest of the world. As long as she is Lisa Williams, no one else can know her address.

There's been a change in the way they act with each other, Finch notices, an ease, a closeness, a sense of old familiarity. An observation that can't help but be accompanied by a sharp stab of jealousy — ghosts are not supposed to be resurrected complete with long, delicate fingers to rest on the crook of an elbow in the backseat of the car, clearly visible in the rearview mirror. Ghosts are supposed to stay dead, and haunt.

So when he pulls into the drive and they take the suitcases from the trunk and walk inside, Finch waits only long enough to check all of the cameras through his phone. They're all operating, the ones inside and outside. He has them in all of the rooms except the bedrooms, which are covered with a camera on each door and window. Finch might not be able to see what happens inside — nor does he want to — but no one except Jessica and Reese can get in or out without raising the alarm in the facial recognition software he has monitoring the feeds at all times.

Satisfied everything is working, and with no sign that Reese is going to come back out to the car, Finch puts it in reverse, heads back toward Manhattan. This will change things, he knows. Reese has something to lose, now, and it may make him cautious, turn him into a less effective operative, albeit one Finch is a little more comfortable with, one less likely to shoot first and ask questions later.

Even though she'll have nothing to do with their work with the numbers, Jessica has become a factor in their operation, one with more influence than Carter, Fusco, Snow, Elias, anyone. Because there are any number of things that can happen with Jessica — she could be abducted again, killed this time. Or, more simply, she could break things off with Reese, because a relationship based on years of longing and comparably little time together doesn't exactly have the greatest odds for survival.

Regardless of what it is, if anything happens with her, Finch expects it will be messy. Reese will fall apart again, and Finch will need to be ready to remind him there's a reason to live, that there are numbers — people — who will die if Reese allows himself to go into a tailspin. He will have to hope this is enough.

Inside the little house, Reese is still getting used to the idea of staying somewhere that feels like a home. Small, warm, sparsely but tastefully decorated, things he absorbed but didn't really reflect on the last time he was here, more focused then on evidence of who Lisa Williams was, what she looked like. There is no doubt that he'll be staying here, although Finch seems to have neatly dealt with Snow — at least for now — and she should be safe without him. He'll be staying here and they'll be sharing the bed in her bedroom, just as they have the hotel bed, ever since the night Finch called to dig up all of his skeletons.

There are going to be times he can't stay here, though, times it is too late to come back here and he needs to use one of the crash pads in the city, times he'll be out on surveillance all night, not sleeping at all. He's explained this to Jessica, walked her through all of the protocols involved in the various ways she can always contact him. Given her the chunky pendant necklace Finch soldered together, the stone in the middle actually a panic button, the silver oval a GPS tracker.

He'd been planning on giving her a gun, too, but she says already has one, leads him back into the bedroom and opens the top drawer in her nightstand. A nice little Beretta, and she says she remembers what he taught her — they'd been dating for several months before he'd ventured to take her to a firing range, but she'd been pretty good for a beginner, once she got used to the recoil. Still, he makes her load and unload it multiple times, then unload it again and dry fire it a few times before he's satisfied.

When these preparations are over, they walk down to the market to pick up enough items to make dinner, and partially replace the moldering contents of her refrigerator. It's an outing that feels wildly strange to Reese, wandering up and down the rows a step behind Jessica, buying fruits, vegetables, salad greens, grass-fed beef, organic cheese. He looks at all of the people with their canvas bags and their thick-knit sweaters and thinks, this is what the rest of the country was doing, while he was killing people, this is a world where he will never belong. She must notice him drifting away, because she gently touches his arm, tells him they have enough for now, why don't they head home?

At least in the house, he feels like he could be comfortable here, could belong here. Not, perhaps, the way he thought he would in the days after he'd resigned his commission, when he'd envisioned a bigger house with Jessica, full of kids. Rowdy boys, covered in mud, thundering in through the back door, sweet little girls toting dolls through the family room, some safe government contract job to support them all. That all came down with the towers, but still, he could belong here with her, in the times between the numbers.

After dinner, she pours them each a second glass of wine, asks if he'd like to go out on the deck, watch the sun set. He would have said yes anyway, but when she shyly adds that it's something she's done almost every night since she's been living here, it feels like a gift from her, a glimpse into her life of the past few years.

The breeze is mild today, the waves on the Sound gently rolling and a faint smell of salt in his nose as they step out onto the deck. The sun large and low on the horizon, the sky around it bold shades of yellow, orange, purple. Reese can see why she came out here, evening after evening; there's something mesmerizing about the colors, the waves, the peace of it all. He half expects Finch to call now, to tell him there's another number — they're long overdue and it's the way of his life that something should interrupt this moment.

But at least for this sunset, there is no call. Reese sips his wine and watches a gannet plunge through the water and come back out with a tremendous splash, holding a small fish in its beak. Listens to the gulls squall overhead, the children laughing in some distant backyard. Slips his arm across her back and thinks this might be the closest to peace he's been in ten years.

[end]

AN: So I assumed this was not the way things were going to go on the show, but it was nice to at least give them a happy ending here. Thanks so much to everyone who's been reading. Feedback and constructive criticism are very much appreciated, particularly on pacing and point of view, which I've been focusing on working on in this fic.


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